{"id":8970,"date":"2016-10-31T06:06:46","date_gmt":"2016-10-31T10:06:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=8970"},"modified":"2016-10-30T14:08:47","modified_gmt":"2016-10-30T18:08:47","slug":"phonology-circle-1031-ting-huang","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2016\/10\/31\/phonology-circle-1031-ting-huang\/","title":{"rendered":"Phonology Circle 10\/31 - Ting Huang"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Speaker<\/strong>: <a href=\"http:\/\/linguistics.mit.edu\/user\/tinghua\/\">Ting Huang<\/a> (MIT)<\/br><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Title<\/strong>:  Contrast and context-dependent merger: Evidence from Malaysian Mandarin sibilants<\/br><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Date\/Time<\/strong>: Monday, October 31, 5:00\u00966:30pm<\/br><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Location<\/strong>: 32-D831<\/br><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>This study reports an ongoing merger of Mandarin sibilants spoken in Malaysia. The contrast of dental\/alveolar vs. palatal sibilants in Malaysian Mandarin (MM) is neutralized in the context of high-front vowel. Specifically, while the contrasts between [?a] vs. [sa] and [?u] vs. [su] exist, [si] is the only surface form of the coronal sibilant followed by a high-front vowel \/i\/ ([*?i] is not allowed) in MM (we ignored the retroflex sibilants here, which is irrelevant to this study). We provide evidence from palatography and linguography to show a fine-grained difference among these sibilant variants in place of articulation. The results of spectral moments analysis (Forrest et al. 1988; Jongman 2000; Lee 2014) and F2 onset values (Li 2008; Wilde 1993) also support the argument that the MM sibilants are incompletely neutralized, especially for speakers of younger generation. The phenomenon in question may be attributable to language contact-induced sound change. This also casts doubt to the feature-based account (Clements 1991; Hume 1992) in explaining why [-anterior] of [?] can be retained when followed by a following vowel that is specified with [dorsal] (e.g. [u], [a]), but not by those with [coronal] (e.g. [i]). We extend the line in Flemming\u0092s (2003) that tongue-body position should be specified under [coronal], and argue that distinctiveness of sibilant contrasts may rely as well on tongue-body position of vowels.\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker: Ting Huang (MIT) Title: Contrast and context-dependent merger: Evidence from Malaysian Mandarin sibilants Date\/Time: Monday, October 31, 5:00\u00966:30pm Location: 32-D831 &nbsp; This study reports an ongoing merger of Mandarin sibilants spoken in Malaysia. The contrast of dental\/alveolar vs. palatal sibilants in Malaysian Mandarin (MM) is neutralized in the context of high-front vowel. Specifically, while [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8970"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8970\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8973,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8970\/revisions\/8973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}